


The Fox Wedding

by eris



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou
Genre: M/M, dubious circumstances surrounding consent, everything about matoba is dubious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 14:54:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7226995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eris/pseuds/eris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Humans have such meaningless dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fox Wedding

No uninvited guests had come for their names in several days, at least.

The night was mild and clear, the breeze from the window cool against Natsume's cheeks. Frogs sang serenely from the shadows beneath the house, and a faint perfume of late wisteria came and went with the same caprice of moths fluttering against the screens. Natsume leaned back on his palms and tried to breathe deeply, to drift in the same sweet calm of the air. Summer in the country was an easy, unhurried thing, and so he tried to think easy, unhurried thoughts--as though the axial tilt of the Earth alone might somehow settle his nerves.

"Sensei," he ventured slowly, but despite all efforts his throat was clearly tense around the words. Words had never come to Natsume with ease, but to broach this subject at all seemed to make it somehow uncomfortably real: the memories were only silhouettes in his mind, after all, troubling only by their abnormal persistence. Wind and bamboo wind chimes, the shiver of moonlight on a koi pond, imagery as harmless as it was habitual-- 

He felt immediately foolish, but also that it might be worse to give up halfway through. "Have you seen anything very... unusual, lately? Among the ayakashi, I mean." His more persistent dreams were sometimes seeded by the wills of wayward spirits. Such a tidy explanation would bring anyone a measure of peace. 

Nyanko-sensei was grooming lazily on a cushion, fat from Touko-san's ginger beef and Natsume's share of a pudding. "You're a thousand years too soon," he said, "if you think there's anything you could sense before I could."

Natsume scowled by reflex, but the oversized hog of a cat only kept at its idle gnawing, so after a moment's span of silence he cleared his throat and tried again. "You probably know this already, but I've been having dreams again."

They were such fleeting wonders that several weeks' worth might have drifted past before Natsume noticed any patterns. The few impressions which lingered had a sort of coquettish delicacy all their own: jasmine and rustling paper, the warm brush of a hand on his cheek--and Natsume might wake in a flush with his pulse racing high in his throat, but otherwise they did not seem to mean him any particular harm. Only, he would remember at the most inconvenient moments. Seated in his classroom, staring diligently forward while the professor balanced an equation with a squeaking stub of chalk, Natsume would catch a whispered exchange from several rows behind him and he would remember whispers of a different character, a different soft of warmth pressing soft at the shell of his ear. 

The distraction was growing unmanageable.

"Humans have such meaningless dreams," Nyanko-sensei was saying, muffled by his own fur. "That's not it."

Natsume drew in a breath, caught for a moment between anger and surprise. "So you _have_ noticed!"

Nyanko-sensei turned up his nose, but clearly felt no need to reiterate his sentiments. Natsume dropped onto his back in exasperated defeat, but the ceiling had no advice to offer him either. "I wasn't sure at first," he said, "but it's the same one every night, or something very like it. That's not normal even for humans, I think."

The forest canopy had blocked out the moonlight, but he never stumbled in the dark; the light procession marked a certain path, burning red like embers in the mist between the trees. He was a stranger to his own footsteps, evidence in the pitted mud behind him where he could not remember having been, but it seemed all right that in his dreams he could let an impulse carry him along. Fingertips and murmured voices; flower petals, stars--

Nyanko-sensei finally deigned to raise his head, but he was frowning insofar as a fat, squashed, nominally-feline face could frown. "What's with this wishy-washy stuff? You're not sure, you _think_.... it's kind of pissing me off! I'm getting hungry again. You should bring me another pudding."

Natsume closed his eyes and withheld a sigh for his own sake; if he answered the provocation he'd never learn a thing. "If you eat any more you won't reach your own tail to clean it. Listen--"

"Shut up," the cat suggested, with his usual degree of equanimity. "Idiot. I don't know what you're worried about but there were no ayakashi here. I'd sense it."

"You're too drunk to sense your own face when you stumble home most nights. I'd know if I were possessed again, right?"

"I'm telling you, there was nothing! It's more like--there's just a different smell about you, lately."

Natsume swallowed down his instinctive retort, given pause. "...a _smell?_ "

Nyanko-sensei rolled over so that he faced the opposite wall, then released an obnoxious yawn. The gesture was theatrically dismissive, yet almost certainly unrehearsed. "Your kind are like that," he huffed, sounding offended by the very idea. "You change so fast, it's too bothersome to keep track of that stuff. We'll blink and you'll be dead anyway. I'm looking forward to it."

(One moment he was listening for youkai voices over the noise of his blood in his ears, and next the lights were stars overhead, a clear midsummer sky scattered with bright constellations. Night dew was cold on his skin, but the hands on his shoulders were so very warm--)

Natsume pinched at the headache gathering fast in his temples. "Have I ever told you," he wondered aloud, "that you are the most reassuring bodyguard?"

It shouldn't have even been possible, but Nyanko-sensei was already snoring.

  
  
  


Asking Hinoe was somehow even harder, though she was leaning forward all the while with visibly keen interest. His explanation was brief and halting but he knew from the wry curve of her smile that she'd read between the lines. He waited in the shadows of her forest perch while she mulled her answer, trying not to fidget. The leaves rustled overhead like excited whispers of gossip. 

At length, Hinoe looked down to his nervous, shadowed face, then clucked her tongue and said, "Tell me: have you found yourself in love yet, grandson of Natsume Reiko?"

The question was such an ambush that Natsume nearly dropped his schoolbag in his shock. He looked away to hide the heat that was spreading fast across his cheeks. "I don't see what that has to do with anything!"

Hinoe was already laughing, but it didn't sound unkind. Mercifully, she'd looked away and allowed him space to breathe. "No? You wouldn't want to trouble anyone--is what you think, I bet." She took a long drag from her pipe and exhaled slowly toward the sky, lazy curls of smoke framing a nostalgic smile. "You must know why I ask. It's like Madara said: your smell has changed, of late."

Natsume's face was burning. He thought in particular of the hands, and the feeling of damp heat at his neck, and for a very long moment he found it difficult to speak. "I'm not in _love_ ," he said at last, and shifted on his feet. "It doesn't feel like that at all. This is all just... new."

It was true that for Natsume, the onset of puberty had been awkward and rushed, with little privacy or peace of mind in which to linger; the only kindness of it all had been that back then, no one had cared enough to notice his confusion or his shame. After the initial upheaval had settled to something vague and intermittent, he'd seen no reason to dwell on the subject; romantic interest had mostly never occurred to him over the following years, not when his stay in every town had been so brief and marked primarily by fear. Still, in the back of his mind he'd been guiltily aware of this sudden rush of physicality, that youkai could be especially sensitive where such energies were concerned. 

Was it truly that he had a different _smell?_

"In any case," Hinoe said, "I sense nothing malicious in whatever's troubling you, at least not from ayakashi influence. The whole thing smells so very... _human."_

Natsume ducked his head but Hinoe only made a thoughtful hum around the mouthpiece of her pipe. "Well," she added archly, "I suppose you had to grow up eventually. Though I'd have liked to be the one to--"

"Ah," Natsume interrupted very quickly. By now his blood was thundering in his ears. "I should get home before it's dark, Hinoe-san. Thank you for your insight."

Hinoe's eyes were slightly damp, her smile uncomfortably fond. "Remember," she called after his retreating back. "Sometimes people _want_ you to trouble them, Natsume!"

  
  


(Sometimes he woke before the tree line had receded in the dark. Sometimes he woke with a sense that he had reached his destination without ever making the journey at all. Sometimes he woke and touched his fingers to his mouth and he could not remember why the touch made him wistful, but he knew he should not have followed foxlight, and that he would do it again, and again.)

  
  
  


He most certainly did not ask Tanuma, but as his abysmal luck would have it, Tanuma asked him.

"You'll tell me if it's anything bad?" Tanuma said without preamble. He gave the most apologetic shrug he could manage with arms full of textbooks he was carrying back to storage. In the dusty sunlight filtering through the windows his cheeks were faintly pink from the strain, or from sunburn, or from embarrassment; Natsume had seen less of him lately, and found it was impossible to tell which. If distraction had made Natsume avoidant he knew he should do something about it soon after all; still, they weren't even in the same class, so it seemed entirely _unfair_ that Tanuma could always ambush him in an empty corridor. 

Natsume was briefly stricken by his own inability to determine the worse prospect: that Tanuma was so perceptive he had already gathered some impression of Natsume's mortifying predicament, or that Tanuma had no idea whatsoever and would still somehow draw the truth from him with vague and inoffensive questions. Hinoe's teasing echoed in the background of his mind. When he looked at Tanuma's hands on the books he thought about them curled around his wrists, and had to look away.

"Ah." Natsume rubbed at the back of his neck and thought very hard about not turning red. "What?"

Tanuma studied his face. Of all people, he was certainly most accustomed to reading Natsume's discomfort. Tanuma was a very good friend. Not for the first time, Natsume felt obscurely guilty beneath the scrutiny.

"I just thought it seemed like something was bothering you," Tanuma finally said, but he only shrugged again, as though to signal he would let the matter rest. "Don't overdo it."

It wasn't Tanuma's hands he remembered, because Tanuma's hands would hesitate. Natsume tried to smile. "It's nothing," he promised, with a demonstrative wave.

"Yeah," Tanuma agreed, with one of his soft answering smiles that only ever drove the guilt further in. "See you."

"Yeah," Natsume echoed, and watched his back disappear down the hall.

  
  
  


The following night was the night of the full moon, which meant Nyanko-sensei wouldn't stumble through Natsume's window before the punishing light of dawn. Lying alone on his futon in the unusual quiet of his room, Natsume stared at his ceiling and thought, for the first waking moment in all recent memory, about what it would be like to touch someone intimately, to feel fingertips drag through his hair, across his wrists and his neck and his mouth. He knew in an instant that it was true: that his dreams had converged here after all, at this flush of warmth and speeding pulse, this restless thrill that shivered through his nerves.

 _Troublesome_ , he thought, when he closed his fist around himself with a groan.

  
  
  


When Natsume thought to remove his shoes at the genkan, it occurred to him that he was not wearing any shoes, that instead his feet were smeared with dirt and sticky blades of grass. Surely this was a dream, only his hems were brown with the mud, damp creeping up toward his knees, and the details seemed somehow too specific to be constructed out of nothing. 

Had the door been unlocked, or had it opened? Had he rang a bell? There were hands at his shoulders and hips now, darting to and fro like small white birds. Their work was soothingly impersonal, efficient, careful to cause no alarm. He found himself turning obediently under their care and wondered aloud, "Where am I?"

If anyone responded, he couldn't make out the words, only the rustle of fabrics and the incongruous sound of crinkling parchment. _Shiki_ , he thought with sudden certainty. It was somehow easier to ground himself in that recognition. "What exactly are you doing?"

 _Shh, shh,_ they seemed to say, only it was the hiss of sliding paper, just a nonsense flutter of pages turning as they tied his sash neatly and ushered him forward again. 

At least, Natsume found himself thinking, he wouldn't present himself in dirty pyjamas now. When he raised a hand to push aside the shoji in his path, the trim at his new sleeve caught in the lamplight and shimmered. He crossed the threshold thinking of blurring lanterns, how the fabric of this robe was red like those embers--but everything was far less off-centre here, keeping to proper edges and planes. The narrow old floorboards gave a solid creak beneath his feet. The fresh air was sweet on his face, tinged with incense and the cool scent of wet grass he hadn't noticed before. There was a wide veranda open to the night. Lamps lit the corners of the room, a flickering play of light on the tatami both insubstantial and startlingly real.

Across the room one eye met his, half-lidded, bruised with shifting shadows. "So you've come after all."

Matoba was wearing a plain summer yukata, leaning back on one palm with a teacup in his free hand. There was a short table between them on which sat a kettle, another cup, a scatter of blood-red camellias. Natsume found the presence of mind to frown, although it seemed somewhat late to make the gesture now. Now that his thoughts found some order, he could no longer feel surprised. "I thought it might be you."

"And here you are all the same."

Trees rustled beyond the veranda; somewhere, a chime began to sound in the breeze. Natsume thought of hands on his neck, and the way, not long ago, that Matoba had murmured dangerous words like a secret against the shell of Natsume's ear. His face felt suddenly too warm, but for certainty's sake he said, "Am I dreaming?"

"If you asked that of a dream," Matoba said curiously, "would you trust it to answer you with the truth?"

"I don't think I would trust you either way."

Matoba bared his teeth, looking pleased. "Then let's leave aside the question."

Natsume sat down at the table and folded his legs underneath him. He worried, for a moment, that he might dirty the fabric with his feet, but just as soon he felt a surge of irritation at the thought, at his own heretofore unexamined acceptance of these circumstances. They were alone, now; the shiki had disappeared exactly as they'd arrived, like the tease of the inconstant summer wind. If Natsume strained his ears, he could hear the splash of frogs in the pond outside. He was sure he'd never seen it, yet he could picture with perfect clarity the sway of rushes at its edge, the darting flash of koi beneath the surface of the water. "What am I doing here?"

Matoba was watching him over the rim of his cup, a faint smile still curving his lips. "I should think that's my question to ask, although of course I offer my full hospitality."

Dreaming or no, Matoba hospitality had availed him little in the past, so Natsume did not mince his words. "Is this a spell?"

Matoba tilted his head. "Did you come here on your own, is what you're asking. Is it so strange to think so?"

"Absolutely." The word was sour in Natsume's mouth. He didn't know where he was, though it stood to reason it was another in the seemingly endless series of extravagant Matoba branch houses. Why had he even sat down? He had traversed the night forest alone, he had let Matoba's shiki dress him, he had taken a seat at Matoba's table, and he couldn't account for any of it. "I feel like I've been sleepwalking."

"You're awake now," Matoba offered, with a hint of resignation, as though it were a fact he'd been reluctant to confirm. He levered himself up from his sprawl and reached across the table to take the teapot in his hand. His wrists were thin beneath his sleeves, their shadows dark as bruises, but Natsume knew them already; he had felt Matoba's fingers on his throat and knew they were not fragile. 

Natsume swallowed back his protest without quite knowing why, and so Matoba poured a sweet-smelling liquid into the empty cup. When he settled onto the cushion opposite Natsume he seemed to read something new in Natsume's face, and his laughter was quiet, dark and smooth as the surface of the pond, a thing of similarly indiscernible depth. "It's an ordinary tea, that much I can promise. I feel a sense of deja vu."

Natsume's brows drew together, but he took the proffered cup. Matoba's fingers did not brush his, and their care seemed strangely deliberate, stirring nervous memories at the edges of his mind. He took a long drink to banish the thought and it was hot on his tongue, dully painful. "I'm awake now," he agreed. "But I have no idea how I got here, and if you're determined to be hospitable I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't act as though you haven't either."

"Stingy," Matoba sighed, leaning back. His hair was long enough it pooled on the floor behind him like a dark spill of ink. "You do frustrate others, you know. Never asking for anything outright, giving so little of yourself away."

"...that's not even remotely an answer. Are you saying you're here to take something?"

Matoba never stopped smiling, but the expression grew sharper somehow, reassuringly less opaque. He set his cup back onto the table but his hands were so pale and quick that Natsume thought of restless serpents, and had to tear his eyes away. "All right," Matoba finally said, as though he were granting someone a favour. "It might be unfair to deny I've the advantage of you here, but perhaps you will entertain the possibility that I am just as drawn by this 'spell' as you are."

"So there is one!"

"So there is one," Matoba echoed. "Only I worked it out first, is all."

Natsume considered this and felt no particular sense of relief in it. "The dreams," he said, after the uncertain pause. "Was that you all along?"

Searching out eyes and only ever meeting one; unexpectedly callused hands, fingertips in his hair. Natsume shivered, but presently Matoba had folded his hands away in his sleeves. The fabric of his yukata was a deep, impenetrable blue, like the night horizon that stretched beyond the lantern light. His stare never left Natsume's face. "Oh? You dreamt of me?"

"Don't act like you don't know anything now," Natsume snapped back, with a fresh surge of anger that drew everything remarkably into focus, just as he'd rather it weren't real at all. He could feel heat creeping back up his neck and shifted his weight uneasily. The surface of his tea was trembling in his hands so he set it back onto the table.

Matoba made a non-committal hum, then unfolded his arms and leaned forward. He propped his chin on his hand, and though the barrier remained between them, Natsume felt an instinctive urge to lean away. Flickers of light caught Matoba's eye intermittently, lending it an unsettling gleam. "You don't sound as though you know exactly what accusations you are making. How much do you remember?"

Natsume's blood was throbbing in his face. "I remember enough," he said.

Now Matoba's laughter was soft and sussurant, like the brushed paper sound of his shiki. "You can't even say it aloud, yet you expect me to confess to this crime? At any rate, I've told you, it's not my magic to abuse."

Natsume lowered his eyes, because it was easier to gather his thoughts if he ignored the weight of Matoba's gaze. "You said you were just as affected," he granted, slowly. "Are you suggesting some youkai _sent_ me dreams of you? What possible reason--"

"I think," Matoba said, "it was closer to what you might call resonance? That instead, 'some youkai' allowed our dreams to intersect."

Natsume weighed this carefully. Matoba had little enough reason to lie. Truths were clay in Matoba's hands, but he had also never seemed the type to expend unnecessary energy. He said, "What could you possibly hope to gain by encouraging this?"

Matoba's eye was lazily half-lidded, his posture languid still. "To go with gravity," he said, "is wise."

Natsume's nails were digging deep into his palm, but his voice didn't break when he spoke. "What does that mean?"

Matoba shrugged one shoulder. The folds of his robe settled further apart, so that Natsume could see the shadows at his collarbones now, shifting with the play of lamplight. "A stream flows downhill," he was saying. His voice was improbably soothing, low and dark and nearer still as he leaned to look directly into Natsume's wandering eyes. "It spreads as it can reach, and gravity draws it down to the darkest parts of the earth. Magic is like that. If you tilt a cup, the water wants to spill, the earth to take it in. Set loose a spell and it wants to run its course."

Matoba was quiet for some time before Natsume realised he had finished speaking. Pinned again by his stare, it was abruptly difficult to recall what he had said at all. "Even so," Natsume ventured, and swallowed a lump in his throat before he could continue. "There must be something that could be done."

"Ah," Matoba smiled, "there always is, indeed. But I've felt there is some virtue in the path of least resistance. If all roads lead to the same destination, do you travel the highway or the mountain trail?"

More than anything else, Natsume resented him for having so many words at his disposal when Natsume had so few. He forced his eyes away, and watched instead the dance of moths beyond the screens as they caught the light and flickered like short-lived stars. It was disorienting to think this was a real conversation he was having, but neither was it like his dreams, which had felt indeed like been carried with a gentle current, a reassuring inevitability. Natsume couldn't be sure where 'all roads' were meant to lead, let alone that there were paths he meant to travel. He did know that Matoba Seiji believed ayakashi and their spells were only tools and felt no qualms in using them to his advantage. 

"I don't understand," Natsume said at last, because there was nothing else to trade with but his honesty.

"I expect that at the very least," Matoba offered slyly, "you will be more considerate to where you lend your aid, if you don't welcome such troublesome gifts from your spirit _friends_. You are more apt than most to catch the eye of a meddling old marriage god in a backwater mountain town. Ahh, but I did warn--"

Porcelain clattered when Natsume dropped his palms on the table, but Matoba did not startle. "I didn't ask for anything!"

"No," Matoba agreed, amused. "You wouldn't. But it seems there was something that you wanted after all…?"

Natsume stared hard at the backs of his hands and tried to sort out the mess of emotions simmering under his skin. A spreading pool of spilt tea was reaching for his fingers and staining the scatter of petals. He felt a sudden impulse to apologise, then an equal and opposite impulse to sweep everything from the table altogether. He couldn't move at all. Matoba was very close but he had not moved either, and somehow that was the hardest thing to reconcile. For want of anything else to anchor him, Natsume seized at the ground he knew. "I'm not going to join your--"

"I won't ask that again," Matoba said. 

Natsume looked up, but Matoba was looking toward the night, chin back on his hand, his smile faintly wry. The absence of the stare allowed Natsume a space to simply look, and he felt his nerves settle minutely while he watched the gentle shifting of Matoba's fringe over his cheek and fingertips. His nails were short and round. "Of course the invitation stands and I think there is rather a lot we could learn from each other. But this is--" and Matoba paused a moment, a soft exhale of breath over those thin fingers. "A private matter."

"I don't believe you," Natsume said, but he found it was suddenly without spite. Matoba flicked a lock of hair from his good eye. The column of his throat was long and starkly pale against the black strands falling against it. There was an otherworldly look about him, but like his pink fingernails and the rise and fall of his chest through the folds of his yukata, Matoba was human.

"Is it such a shock to you," Matoba was wondering aloud, "that someone might want you in that way? Surely with your amount of talent you've encountered... suitors."

Natsume jerked his hands back, and drew a sharp lungful of air. Somehow he felt as though he'd just broken the surface of a pool. "Of course not!"

"Ah--your bodyguard might be doing a better job than you give him credit for." 

Irritation seethed hot enough he didn't take another breath when Matoba's eyes met his. "That's none of his business." 

"Hmm," Matoba smiled, indulgent.

Strictly speaking, there was no silence after that. The frog song made no pause, nor the crickets, nor the whisper of the leaning maple leaves. Natsume didn't know why he was angry anymore, so he couldn't hang on to the feeling. The pond water lapped at the shore; Natsume's pulse thrummed in his ears. Natsume was not angry, and he was not afraid, but without Matoba's words to occupy his mind he was left alone with his own inchoate frustration: a sense that everything was unnecessarily difficult, that something had not gone to script at all. All he felt was unbearable tension, suspended by Matoba's stare and his smile and his curious inertia, and then he realised it all at once: that Matoba would wait. 

It was Natsume who followed the foxlight, and Natsume who had to move. 

His voice was small in his own ears. He said, "I thought I was dreaming."

Matoba said, "And there are consequences, outside of a dream."

Natsume looked away, but it wasn't enough, so he stood up and left the table. He went between the open paper screens and dropped back down onto the polished floorboards, let his feet hang over the edge of the veranda, bare and stained by grass under his borrowed red yukata. His nose burned for a moment with the crisp smell of damp earth. His skin prickled into gooseflesh. He thought of Matoba's fingernails and shivered, once, in the night air.

Matoba moved softly, quiet as the rustling grass, but standing at Natsume's side he was suddenly very tall, very present; real. Despite his cool impression he was warm enough Natsume felt it through the space between them. Matoba had not touched him, but the memory was there, humming just beneath the surface of his skin.

The wind chime began to turn again. Matoba sat beside him, looking outward to the stars, white in the moonlight but for the dark flicker of his hair, and Natsume thought he was probably very beautiful.

"You think I must have some sinister ulterior motive," Matoba mused, a lover's murmur, soft and low. His hands were folded over his thighs, and Natsume remembered, with sudden, impossible clarity, the rasp of calluses from the bowstring on his drawing hand. "Because you don't know how to be selfish, to feel without obligation. But in truth this is not a very complicated thing. It concerns only you and only me."

Natsume looked up and Matoba wasn't looking away anymore. Matoba's stare was so dark it seemed to swallow him, to rob him of his breath, and he thought that this time he might not find the surface, that Matoba would let him drown. "Can't that be reason enough?" Matoba was saying, and Natsume wanted to shut his eyes to that look, but he didn't. "I _want_ you."

The crude words drove a shudder through him. He leaned, fractionally, instinctively, toward the heat. 

It was enough.

Matoba brushed his fingertips across Natsume's cheek. For a very long moment Natsume forgot how to respond, to inhabit his own body while it _felt_ so much, all at once, from such an incongruously small touch. Matoba's hands, once so perilous, were unbearably tender when they pushed apart the fabric at his throat. Matoba's smile was sharp enough to cut him, but he only pressed an open-mouthed kiss to Natsume's bared shoulder, then pulled his lips across the skin to Natsume's collarbone, and further still, until they were moving through the hair behind his ear. 

Natsume's eyelids felt heavy, his breath somehow shallow, but it was nothing at all like falling asleep. "It's fine," Matoba was murmuring on his skin, "if you don't ask for anything but exactly what you want. I won't give you more than I want either. I have no use for your promises."

Promises bound youkai, not men. Matoba brushed the hair from his brow, and Matoba's mouth found the lobe of his ear, and Natsume let out a noise, humiliatingly near to a moan. Matoba only mouthed at his jaw, then closer, toward the corner of Natsume's lips. Matoba smelled like soap and jasmine incense. All the dream impressions were scattering, overwhelmed by the tightness in Natsume's chest, the sudden stutter of his pulse. "A spell may guide you here," Matoba breathed, hot against Natsume's mouth. "But it can't make you say yes."

Natsume closed his eyes and pressed in. 

Matoba's inertia broke like a wave over his head, all the tenderness gone in an instant. His mouth was hard and his tongue was a rough slide against Natsume's tongue, a perverse thrust and curl in his mouth. Matoba's hands pushed the yukata further apart, stroked over his skin in a restless demand, and when he pulled back on a sigh the bitter tea aftertaste of the kiss was so real it sent a thrill down Natsume's spine, an ache throbbing heavy and low.

He _wanted_ this. He had asked for this, night after night without rest, but it was impossible to think he was allowed to have it, that it might come with no expectations, no half-truths or lies of omission.

Matoba's larger body leaned over him, pressed him back, pressed his wrists back against the hard wood of the floor, and Matoba was so heavy and close there was no space left to feel ashamed by the soft whine of need in his throat. Matoba's fingers curled tight on his wrists and Matoba swallowed the keening sounds with his mouth, drank them down and kept pulling under until Natsume forgot to breathe at all. Natsume's head was swimming, and Matoba's mouth was everywhere, sucking at the base of his throat, his temples, his brow, and he could never be mistaken for anyone else, not in a dream or behind Natsume's closed eyelids.

Matoba's palms slid down from his wrists and Natsume almost missed their bruising pressure, but then Matoba's thumbs were on Natsume's cheeks, his fingers curling around Natsume's neck and holding him in place. Matoba bit down hard on his lip, and drew blood.

Natsume's eyes shot open at the shock of the pain and Matoba's face was right above his, smiling with teeth, a bright smear of red at the corner of his mouth. "This isn't a dream," he said.

Natsume swallowed hard. He licked over the hot sting in his lip and watched Matoba's pupil dilate to see it, triumphant and hungry like the youkai he hated, a cursed beast breaking free of a seal. Natsume tugged loose the cord in Matoba's hair so that it spilled over his shoulders, dark and silk-fine and cool through his fingers, and Matoba only hummed his amusement, so Natsume took a fistful and pulled. 

_Don't condescend to me now_ , Natsume meant to say, but Matoba pressed down with his knee and Natsume had to bite his own bleeding lip, to ride out the sensation with the words caught uselessly in his throat. He had felt it, though--Matoba's pulse, racing through the skin of his wrist when it was pressed to Natsume's wrist. The low groan dragged from somewhere too deep for pretence. Matoba's impression of control was unravelling over him, lost somewhere in friction and need, and somehow that fact alone brought immeasurable relief. Matoba hadn't lied after all: the intensity of his _want_ was enough to leave Natsume dizzy.

Was that resonance, after all? Natsume couldn't look and he couldn't speak so he opened his mouth instead, inviting Matoba back in. 

Flushed, straining towards an answering heat, still he wondered what the ayakashi had seen in Matoba that made them seem at all alike in their loneliness. When Matoba sleeve fell away, there was a pale line of scar from Natsume's hands clawing free of him when they'd met. Natsume had an answering mark on his own skin, from the graze of Matoba's arrow. Perhaps there was also a cruel sort of resonance to scars, but Matoba's nails were scraping pale lines down Natsume's sides, and Natsume's pulse was throbbing in his bruised lip and against Matoba's thigh, and he didn't have to think about it anymore; his consideration was neither expected nor welcome. If that freedom had an edge of obscure sadness, Matoba was pushing apart Natsume's legs and so he couldn't hold it in his thoughts for very long.

"Sometimes," Matoba told him, looking up from under dark lashes while his hand brushed across Natsume's abdomen, then slid lower--"you seem very far away."

"I'm not," Natsume managed, and found that it was true; Matoba's fingers closed around him and he had never felt more present in himself, more greedy and awake. There wasn't time enough to be embarrassed before Matoba's mouth was on him, tight and wet and pleased by every ragged sound he could wring from Natsume's throat.

Natsume shut his eyes and let his hips move against the heat. He let Matoba taste the sounds spilling free of his mouth, and now he let Matoba taste everything else he wanted to taste, because it was a simple thing after all. He could not think of why he shouldn't have it, and let everything else go with the night.

  
  
  
  
  


A light series of rain storms passed over the town, and summer waned fast after that, into cooler air and golden ginkgo leaves crunching underfoot. Dreams did not trouble Natsume anymore, although he found memory could be far more vivid than the dreams had ever been. With exams and returning names and Natori's increasingly regular requests for his assistance, Natsume had no shortage of distractions. If Nyanko-sensei noticed anything amiss, it was beneath him to offer comment. Life did not change with any more fanfare than the seasons had, and Natsume felt neither relieved nor disappointed. He found a certain sense of serenity after all: the sort of satisfaction that comes from having a secret, and keeping it.

Matoba's letter arrived without interference. He wrote with a brush and ink, and the paper was scented, and his calligraphy was very fine, and all of this made Natsume scowl because it was exactly like some classic Heian suitor passing illicit poetry to a lover--but Natsume did read the words before he threw the thing away.

 _You know the path,_ they read, which was annoyingly coy and also true. 

If he accepted the invitation, he would not need foxlight to find his way.

  


**Author's Note:**

> A fox wedding (狐の嫁入り) is a folk term for atmospheric ghost lights resembling a procession of wedding lanterns, said to be a trick of spirits. This story was so very self-indulgent, but: congratulations on a fifth season, I guess.


End file.
